Labor reporting and the baseball strike
Wilentz, Sean
The abbreviation of the 1994 baseball season depressed millions of Americans, but it was crushing for fans of the New York Yankees. What a team we had: not Murderers' Row, maybe, but strong up...
...But you take what you can get...
...and if Waldman, the best reporter on the beat, were to be named the Yankees' play-by-play announcer...
...But there's no point in being a baseball fan unless you can dream a little...
...In New York, the heyday of labor reporting was over by the 1960s...
...WINTER • 1995 • 13...
...And then there was the incomparable Suzyn Waldman, the station's regular Yankee correspondent...
...Some of the best reporting came over the radio on the city's all-sports station, WFAN...
...Imagine if, now, Steinbrenner, fed up with the situation, were to step aside...
...A piece by Pat Jordan in the Sunday magazine treated management to a humorous drubbing worthy of the old Masses...
...and even the Times has not had a regular labor correspondent since the departure of William Serrin in the 1980s...
...Dammit, it was our year...
...But not this past year, our year, because the team owners had secretly decided long ago there would be no year this year...
...Or so it looked so late in the year that many of us had cleared our calendars for October...
...Nobody on the air conducts better post-game interviews and locker-room reports...
...Well, maybe just a little good has come of it...
...After the strike hit, she was the first person I heard pronounce the blunt but truthful words about what was really going on: "Union busting...
...if Don Mattingly, rejuvenated by the layoff, were to play another five seasons...
...When reality intrudes on romance, make the best of reality—and so it went with the reporting of this mess, as sportswriters and broadcasters had to become quick studies in industrial politics and microeconomics...
...Coverage of labor troubles, especially with a broad sympathy for labor, has been in decline in the mainstream American media for a long time...
...At the Times, Murray Chass skillfully explained the doomed negotiations and the larger issues at stake...
...But for a while, as the season hung in the balance, the New York sports pages began to look like the labor pages...
...The tabloids, especially the Daily News, made up in style what they lacked in explication...
...Even under Steinbrenner's surreal rule, even during the successive mediocre summers, there has always been reason enough for hope: a prospect up from Columbus, a three-game winning streak in June...
...Nothing good has come of this, which is a shock to the system, because baseball fans are used to finding something good in the direst of circumstances...
...All very unlikely...
...Waldman won my admiration years ago as a straight sports reporter, with her frankness, her hard work, and her exceptional knowledge of the game...
...I would have given it all back in a second for a full season...
...Especially Yankee fans, for whom the past decade, on the field and off, hovered between the boring and the excruciating until the recent turnaround...
...At the New Yorker, Roger Angell's annual end-ofseason review filled in some of the gaps about the owners' maneuvering...
...The columnist George Vecsey brilliantly evoked the owners' bad faith...
...What a team we had: not Murderers' Row, maybe, but strong up the middle, deep on the bench, with solid hitting through the entire lineup, plus the miraculous Jimmy Key...
...A renaissance of labor reporting is not exactly what I had looked forward to back during spring training...
...Just after the team owner and acting commissioner, Bud Selig, officially pulled the plug on 12 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions the season, the station's Ed Coleman (who normally covers the Mets) held a kind of wake, talking to managers and players, and leaving little doubt that this entire business could have been averted had the owners not wanted it to occur...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
